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Infant Baptism

I. Background: Baptism itself is not a “christian” act. If you took a video of
a baptism and removed the sound it could be any pagan rite. What makes it “Christian”
is the word of God.

II. We do not practice infant baptism because we are ignoring the Word of God, but
because we take it VERY seriously. Baptism cannot be ignored as a central doctrine regarding our relationship to Christ and His Church. Rom. 6, John 3, Col. 2, Eph. 4, Galatians 3, Acts 2 etc.

III. Before we get to what Baptism is, we need to talk about some related
issues that are all connected to how we understand baptism and its place in our
relationship to God and the Church.

1. What is Faith? Is it based in intellectual assent, rationalistic deduction, ability to reason, think, exercise logic and language? This is a philosophy based in Western thinking that has elevated reason since the 11th century and the rise of Scholasticism and later humanistic philosophies in the West.
2. Faith in Scripture is not fundamentally based in “reason” it is trust and “relationship”: pistis (NT Greek) is trust, confidence, or belief. Reason and logic can either strengthen faith OR destroy it as we grow intellectually.
3. There is no word for “relationship” in Greek. It is expressed in prepositions, as in “I am in books” which means I sell books, or I am INTO books, which means I cannot pass up a sale. The prepositions tell about the relationship. In Greek there are no words for “I have a personal relationship with Christ” but it is expressed by saying we are “IN Christ”, or baptized INTO Christ, etc.
4. Faith is relationship with God AND human beings that transcends reason.
Psalm 22:9 “Thou brought me forth from the womb and didst make Me to trust when on my mother’s breast.” Trust is a pre-rational relationship that can be had by infants.
5. Matt 18, Lk. 18 Jesus says let the “little ones” (GR: suckling babies) come to me. Jesus is aware that relationships of faith/trust are formed even before birth. John the Baptist leaped for Joy while in Elizabeth’s womb when he encountered Christ who was still in the womb of Mary.
6. Is God limited by our intellect? Can there be no “personal relationship” with God apart from our cognitive recognition of Him? Do we as parents wait until our children can recognize us and say our names before we love them? Does a relationship with God begin on our part only when we can “name” God?
7. IF Faith is based in reason, then geniuses would potentially be the most pious people. Questions: IS ability to trust linked to IQ? Does a person HAVE to have rational reasons to love? Can someone trust another apart from logic? Does a person who gets Alzhiemers lose their faith? Are mentally handicapped people LESS capable of faith because of limited intellectual capacities?
IV. Is Infant Baptism a Violation of Free Will?
1. TRUE FREEDOM IS COMMUNION WITH GOD NOT RECOGNITION OF UNLIMITED CHOICES. Freedom is only in Christ, not the presentation of all possibilities. A child is TRULY free if it is in Christ and in the will of God.
2. If it never occurs to you to do something gross (like eat raw fish) does it mean
you don’t have free will? No, it means you have no interest in it.
3. If a child is raised in faith, taught about God, trusts God, loves God,
etc. have you violated his free will by doing so? Is it a guarantee that
they will have free will if you raise them with no convictions? If you baptize an infant in order to raise him in faith from day one, how does that violate free will? If an infant is baptized it still faces the choice daily to either do God’s will or deny Him. A baptized person has all of the benefits of the Church, Christ, God and the communion of the saints to help him make the proper choice.

V. AGE OF ACCOUNTABILITY See Jordan Bajis “Common Ground” pp 265-66
1. When is the “age of accountability”? When kids know right from wrong?
Sing Jesus Loves Me? Articulate a doctrine of justification and atonement?
If faith is knowledge and reason, doesn’t it get HARDER to have faith
as we get older? Why are CHILDREN held up to be the models of faith by Jesus? Because the essence of faith is TRUST not reason.
2. Faith as a relationship of trust is the same at all ages. Faith can be informed by, shaped by and strengthened OR weakened by reason.
3. WHO discerns when a child (or even an adult) is ready for baptism? The parent, the pastor, the church, the child? In “adult baptism” someone else “more mature and rational” than the child decides if the child is “really ready” or not. So the child is STILL discerned by others, not by God alone or on the basis of “his own” faith. Thus there is not strict “accountability to God alone” but accountability to a church, pastor or parent even in adult baptism traditions. In infant baptism that reality is acknowledged from day one.
4. Instead of lowering age of accountability, why not raise it?
One of the first extra-biblical mentions of infant baptism was Tertullian 160 AD) who argued against infant baptism. This is evidence that it was indeed practiced VERY early in Church history. But the interesting thing is that he did so on basis of a heresy that sins committed after baptism couldn’t be forgiven, and he advocated deathbed baptism to insure salvation.

What About the Concept of a Child is “automatically saved until the age of reason”?
1. We have to ask several questions here:
a. Can a person be saved outside of Christ?
b. Can one be saved without faith in Christ?
c. Are there any explicit “exception clauses” for children in the Bible?
d. What was saving a child before the age of accountability that is different
from or expired on the day he reached the age of accountability?
e. What made the child spiritually secure and complete in Christ one day
and then was insufficient and inadequate the next to keep him that way?
f. What was it that saved a child until adolescence then lost its power to
save him at age 13?
g. Can a person be saved by grace and not by Christ?
h. Is it possible to be saved apart from Christ?

FOLLOW THIS CAREFULLY… Most people who believe in adult baptism
also believe that it is merely symbolic of our saving relationship with Christ by faith…So, if you say the child is saved, then it must be through Christ somehow. If it is through Christ, he is a Christian if he is being raised in a Christian home hearing the gospel. If the Child is a Christian, then he is a member of the body of Christ. If he is a member of the church and is saved, then why deny the child baptism?

Neither infant baptism NOR adult baptism as a “personal rational decision” is a guarantee against backsliding, sinning, or nominalism. BOTH require a life of faithfulness to Christ.

VI. THE REAL QUESTION: The early church focussed on WHAT baptism is not
WHEN it should be done.
1. What is baptism? It is a sacrament of community, it is how we are united to Christ and His Church, which is His body. United with Christ (Rom. 6) Put on Christ (Gal. 3:27), Col 2:12. Raised with Christ, I Cor. 12:13 baptized into by one Spirit, baptized into one body, which is the Church.
2. In the early Christian thought, baptism was like circumcision, identified you with Christ, incorporated you into the people of God, put you into communion with Christ. (Col. 2:12).
In the Christian West baptism eventually became identified with doing away with original sin, the inherited guilt of Adam’s sin in an infant, a doctrine which the Orthodox Church rejects. Thus, baptism has always been in order to place one in the Body of Christ, in a relationship with the Community of believers, into a relationship with Christ in which the human nature which is crippled by sin can begin to be healed from the very beginning of our life.

INFANT BAPTISM AND TRINITARIAN LIFE:
Protestants and the Trinity: Many modern evangelicals will affirm the DOGMA of the Trinity, but cannot articulate it and have no concept of how it applies in any practical way to our spiritual life. We have to understand the Nature of God in Trinity to understand how we are saved by our Trinitarian God in Whose image we are created. Baptism is an expression of this relationship and is why we are baptized in the Trinitarian formula.

1. What does it mean to be a person? Modern evangelicalism talks about a “Personal relationship with Christ?” But that REALLY means an
“individual relationship with Christ”. True “personhood” and “personal relationship” can ONLY be had in “community”. Apart from a community of faith there IS NO “personal salvation”.
2. WHY? The Life of the Trinity! God is ONE ESSENCE in THREE PERSONS, or in modern language “three Who’s in one What”. God is not an “individual” but Persons who live in an eternal communion and movement of love among the Three. There is no God apart from Communion of Love AND Personhood. To attain “true personhood” we HAVE TO be perfected in Love within a community of other persons.
3. Can we be saved “individually”? NO. To be saved is to LOVE, and LOVE assumes OTHERS, if there is no community, there is no salvation.
4. Baptism is the NEW BIRTH into the community of faith, the CHURCH, where one learns to overcome sin, self, individualism and separation from others/GOD. Thus, baptism is not a private thing, between you and God, it is between you, the Church and God. It is birth into the family of God, the place
where God is worshipped, loved, taught, and is present.
3. Baptism BEGINS the life in Christ, and like all lives and relationships
it grows matures and bears fruit, but like all human relations it happens
in the context of a community of some kind. This is evidenced in the scriptures by the phenomenom of :

HOUSEHOLD BAPTISMS: SEE JORDAN BAJIS pp 288-89

I Cor. 1:16 Paul baptized the household of Stephanus.
Acts 11:13ff Peter baptized the household of Cornelius.
Acts 16:15 Paul baptizes the household of Lydia
Acts 16:31 Philippian jailer’s household is baptized.
HEBREW word “bayit” is translated “oikos” (Greek) in LXX.
In the OT. “oikos” included all family members up to 4 generations, children (married and unmarried), slaves of both sexes, and sojourners (non-Jewish migrant workers).

Genesis 46:6,27: Jacob’s household: all his sons, and their children and wives, all the persons of the house of Jacob were 70.

I Samuel 22:15-19: All the household of Ahimelech and his father are killed: men, women, children, infants and all his livestock.

2 Samuel 2:3 David brought up all his men each with his household to Hebron.

2 Samuel 15:15-16 David flees Jerusalem with all his household, leaves 10 concubines to tend the house.

I Samuel 25:6 David sends blessings to Nabal, peace be to your house and all that you have.

Jeremiah 38:17 Jeremiah prophecies against Zedekiah that his household will be killed if he does not obey God.

It is clear from Scripture that Household baptisms in the early Church included infants. The Acts Church was STILL predominantly Jewish and the passages in Acts need to be understood in the context of Jewish thought and
definitions of terms. Adult baptism is as much an “interpretation” of Scripture as infant baptism, and given the Scriptural witness and witness of the practice and teachings of the Early Church immediately after the apostolic era, it is
clear that infant baptism has greater theological and historical support than
the modern concept of baptism that developed out of the post Reformation era and is based on the Western philosophical concepts of the primacy of reason, rationality and logic.

TO CONCLUDE: Is infant baptism “magic”? Does the Orthodox Church believe that infant baptism somehow bestows irrevocable eternal life on an infant apart from its continued life of faith and growth in the will of God?
No. This is best summed up by Fr. Thomas Hopko:

“If there are no adults to care for the child’s spiritual life and church upbringing, then it is normally understood by the Orthodox church that such a child should not be baptized. Baptism is not magic. It is not an act in which something happens to a person in isolation outside the ongoing life of the Church into which the person is born in the baptismal mystery.”

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